Game Review: Corgi Warlock

Do you like corgis? Do you like warlocks? Have you ever thought about combining them!?!? Well, neither had anyone else. Until now! Corgi Warlock follows the ‘epic’ quest of Maia the Corgi, who is attempting to free the world from the evil forces of the undead rabbit king. As they wander through this throw-away story, Maia and up to three other friends (through local only co-op) must fight through waves and waves of enemies and bosses.

Corgi Warlock is a side scrolling… game. It’s one that doesn’t really fit into any of the current categories. It probably comes closest to those old “Armour Games” that you would play through whatever site your school hadn’t managed to block. Things like “Black Knight” and such, where your main aim is just to move to the end of the level in a beat ’em up style but without any of the combat complexity.

You start with just a simple fireball, and throughout the game unlock more powerful spells. However, these spells are really just larger beams that do more damage with a longer cooldown and that’s about it. There’s not much complexity to the combat, even with the added special ‘Corgi Power’ and shields. It’s really quite simple.

Instead, any complexity then comes from the sheer variety of monsters in the game. There’s a huge number, and many of them act very differently. Ultimately, the combat comes down to avoiding any projectiles and ensuring that most things are dead before they can reach you. This mostly requires learning monster attack patterns and being able to act accordingly. But even then, and probably because of this, the game is not very hard at all. I died a handful of times at the most, and the majority were from missing a platform and falling into the water/lava.

Furthermore, for a game made by a former animator for Pixar, Sony and DreamWorks the animation is nothing to write home about. Much of it feels quite slow, and without much of a flow. What the animations do have however (and the rest of the game for that matter) is character. This game oozes character. From the stylistic choices of the characters and backgrounds, to the dialogue and animation. Every single bit of this game feels somewhere between a Saturday morning cartoon and the old Flash games we loved growing up.

All in all, Corgi Warlock isn’t great. Its repetitive combat gets boring quickly, and its lack of depth means that while it only takes two to three hours, it still manages to outstay its welcome. The co-op battle arena is fun for a few rounds, but again quickly loses its appeal. But if you’re looking for a fun little experience, you could do far worse than this.